Travels, travails, and stories in Korea and elsewhere — "Been inclined to wander / Off the beaten track …. I've held my licence / It came with birth / For self reliance on this earth" – Judas Priest, "Grinder"

Tag Archives: literature

Today’s post will be a quick one, for it’s meant to show how we can find many Manosphere ideas in popular literature

Charles Bukowski’s a favorite writer of mine. His work might be described as “drinking various liquors and screwing various women,” but his autobiographical protagonist, Henry Chinaski, did more than just that. His novel Women‘s a veritable compendium of hookup situations and how he handled them for better or worse. Alongside his typically excellent dialogues, he gives us this nugget:

“My problem was that I couldn’t rest my cock-godhead like I could my typer-godhead. That was because women were available only in streaks so you had to get as much in as possible before somebody else’s godhead came along. I think the fact that I quit writing for ten years was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. (I suppose that some critics would say that it was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to the reader, too.) Ten year’s rest for both sides. What would happen if I stopped drinking for ten years?” [Emphasis mine]

Up there is the scarcity mentality many men have women it comes to women. The man must hang on to whatever women he can because he has no idea now long they’ll last. Rational Male has written more about scarcity mentality here, as have many other ‘Sphere writers and how it can be detrimental to a man’s psyche because it breeds desperation. Enjoy.

“Be certain,” Catelyn told her son, “or go home and take up that wooden sword again. You cannot afford to be indecisive in front of men like Roose Bolton or Rickard Karstark. Make no mistake, Robb–these are your bannermen, not your friends. You named yourself battle commander. Command.”

— Lady Catelyn to her son Robb Stark in A Game of Thrones (531)

…nor can a man afford to be indecisive in front of his girlfriend, his students, or anyone, really. It’s incumbent on him to take the lead and drive things forward, whether it be the relationship, the lesson, the battle, or the Honda Accord. Being able to make a choice and stand by it is what separates the metaphorical men from the boys here. Hemming and hawing does a man no favors.

The key idea here’s to make a choice and stand by it. If my girlfriend asks me, “Where do you want to go for dinner?”, she’s asking me to choose for us. A lot of guys make the mistake of thinking that they should choose something she likes*, but as Danny showed, when she asks you, it’s about you and what you’d like. When girlfriend was over last night and asked, “Do you know what you’d like for dinner?” I thought for a second and said, “Fish.” We proceeded to go to the food fish place in town and enjoyed a quality spread. In the past, I would think, “Is this the right choice? Is she going to like it? What if she doesn’t?” Such thoughts are poisonous because they leading down the paralyzing road of self-doubt. Do your best to keep those thoughts out of mind and move forward.

Here’s the Wipers and their anthem “Up Front.” Greg Sage’s line “I can’t stick around while you try to decide” is an all-time favorite.

It’s got to be up front…I can’t stick around while you try to decide

Rock on…

*In other words, you’re not a mind reader. How she’s acting can provide plenty of clues about what’s inside her head, but nobody’s perfect.

** Related songs:

Husker Du’s “Indecision Time”

Go to the left, go to the right
Your mind is going to keep you up all night
You twist in your sleep, grabbing the sheets, sweating to death

Excellent read. Coming as it did after The Fountainhead and The Help,Fight Club provided a welcome change of pace. Chuck Palahniuk’s debut novel has the quintessential unreliable narrator and its laconic phrasing packs a punch into virtually every sentence.

Much has been said about Tyler Durden and how he exhorted men to become more than their jobs and their bank accounts, but something else worth considering is that the novel came out around the time when The Joy Luck Cub and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a fact that Palahniuk notes in his Afterword. He mentions them because he saw Fight Club as a male counterpoint to those two novels about women being together. Indeed, having reread The Joy Luck Club earlier this year, I can see his point. Both were about sharing yourself and learning from your past, but Fight Club happens to hit harder.* This young man relates more to the story of Tyler Durden and its themes of self-destruction and self-improvement.

* This is not meant to take away from The Joy Luck Club‘s good qualities. Amy Tan’s novel has a more sophisticated structure than Palahniuk’s. Tan’s multiple narratives and voices blend together to vividly illustrate how geography, culture, and language shape mothers and daughters. Fight Club, on the other hand, could take place in any US thanks to its Everyman narrator and anonymous buildings.

While I’m about a quarter of the way through Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, it’s become clear that its musical equivalent is Frank Sinatra’s (or Sid Vicious’s, depending on your frame of reference) song “My Way.” Roark does everything his way or he doesn’t do it at all. He equates compromise with treason and doesn’t care about material success so long as he gets things his way. He’s as selfless as he is selfish, for he forsakes money as easily as he forsakes commissions for projects he doesn’t like.

Howard Roark is as monolithic as they come, as stubborn as Neil Young, and as driven as Don Draper. The three of them have plenty in common, for they are more devoted to their art than than they are to anything else. Of course, only one of those men is real, but all three share the drive to satisfy their artistic ambitions.

As I continue reading, my questions are:

Can Roark find success as an architect?
Will he ever compromise?
How will people react to Roark taking common construction jobs?
What happens between Peter, Dominique, and Katie?

The Knight makes an excellent point about The Republic and about classic literature in general: Many have an idea of what the work’s about, but few can actually comprehend it or apply it to issues of today. I read Plato a long time ago and figure it’s high time to give him another read. Indeed, The Republic is a seminal work about how to build the perfect nation-state ruled by a philosopher-king. It also features an excellent passage about MGTOW. See for yourself here…

Related articles

I was making my way through ‘The Republic’ by Plato yesterday when I came across a particularly passage I will share in a moment.

Quickly though I wanted to mention that like most books ‘everyone’ seems to know a little about, the primary knowledge is no where near what the books actual message is. I see this pattern a lot, everyone talks about books in this general knowledge sort of way, and those messages I have found to be about 100% NOT what the pseudo-elites pretend they know about it.

For example another book I just finished was Thus Spoke Zarathustra by F. Nietzsche, for a long time until I educated myself I thought Nietzche was FOR nihilism. Little did I know this gem of a book rails against nihilism and how the superior man should take his rightful place.

Anyway, so The Republic, conventionally understood as some feel-good novel…